
GOAT- 
FEATHERS 




PS 



ELLIS PARKER BUTLER 




Class J£S_AS_01 



CopyiiglitN?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



^QoU 6p eiltfii |3atlter Sutler 

PUBLISHED BY 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



GOAT-FEATHERS. 

PHILO GUBB, CORRESPONDENCE- 
SCHOOL DETECTIVE. With illus- 
trations. 



Goat-Yeathers 



GOAT- 
FEATHERS 

BY 

eilis Tarker 
"Butler 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

Tke Riverside Press Cambridge 

1919 



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COPYRIGHT, I918, BY THE CROWELL PUBLISHING 
COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, I919, BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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MAR 22 I9iy 
©CLA5i5o01 



Goat'Yeathers 



GOAT- 
FEATHERS 

NO human being ever tells 
the whole truth about him- 
self. We seem to be born 
liars in that particular, all of us, and 
I am no different. I 'm starting out 
now to tell the bitter, agonizing 
truth about myself, but before I am 
through I shall probably be lying 
at the rate of a mile a minute and 
cracking myself up something aw- 
ful! A man can tell only so much 
truth; then he begins to wabble. 

The truth is, I ought to be mak- 
ing as much money as Robert W. 
Chambers, and winning prizes of 
honor like Ernest Poole, and I 'm 

page 3 



Goat-Yeathers 

not. I ought to be better known as 
a humorist than George Ade and 
Mark Twain rolled into one, and 
I 'm not. The trouble with me is 
that I am always too ready and ea- 
ger to break away and go gather- 
ing goat- feathers. If it had not been 
for that I might be a millionaire or 
the President of the United States 
or the leading American Author, 
bound in RedRussialeather. Imight 
have been a Set of Books, like Sir 
Walter Scott or Dickens or Balzac, 
and when people passed my house 
the natives would say, "No, that 
isn'tthecityhallorthe court-house; 
that 's where Butler lives." Of 
course some strangers would say, 
"Butler, the grocer?" but that 
would be the ignorant few. The 

page A^ 



Goat 'Y eathers 

real people would whisper, " But- 
ler, the Author! " in a sort of sub- 
dued awe and remove their hats. 
Some of them would pick a blade 
of grass from my lawn and take it 
home to hand down to their chil- 
dren's children as the most treas- 
ured family possession. As it is, I 
have gathered so many goat- feath- 
ers that half the people introduce 
me as Ellis Butler Parker and the 
other half as Butler Parker Ellis, 
and if there is a ton of hay growing 
on my lawn nobody bothers to pick 
a pint. My father has to cut it and 
rake it away. 

Goat-feathers, you understand, 
are the feathers a man picks and 
sticks all over his hide to make him- 
self look like the village goat. It 

page 5 



Goat 'Feathers 

often takes six days, three hours 
and eighteen minutes to gather one 
goat-feather, and when a man has 
it and takes it home it is about as 
useful and valuable to him as a 
stone-bruise on the back of his neck. 
I have recently spent several days 
over a month gathering one goat- 
feather, and as a reward I was 
grabbed and chased after another 
that ate up two weeks and three 
days of my time. Goat- feathers are 
the distractions, side lines and de- 
flections that take a man's atten- 
tion from his own business and keep 
him from getting ahead. They are 
the Greatest Thing in the World 
— to make a man look like a goat. 
I think I can claim, without fear 
of dispute, to have gathered more 

page e 



Goat-Yeathers 

goat-feathers in a fifty-year career, 
and to look more like a goat, than 
any other man living, and not ex- 
cepting Pooh Bah, who added such 
a pleasing, goat-like character to 
Gilbert-and-SuUivan's " Mikado." 
Pooh Bah, poor amateur! could 
boast only that he was First Lord 
of the Treasury, Lord Chief Jus- 
tice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord 
High Admiral, Master of the Buck 
Hounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, 
Archbishop ofTitipu,Lord Mayor, 
Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-Gen- 
eral, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
Privy Purse, Private Secretary, 
Lord High Auditor, First Commis- 
sioner of Police, Paymaster Gen- 
eral, Judge Ordinary, Master of the 
Rolls, Secretary of State for the 

page 7 



Goat 'Feathers 

Home Department, Groom of the 
Second Floor Front, and Registrar. 
I can beat that all to pieces. 

When I wake in the morning as 
President of the Authors' League 
Fund I can give some attention to 
my work as Publicity Manager of 
the Liberty Loan Committee while 
preparing to devote an hour or two 
to the Secretaryship of the Arme- 
nian Relief and the Treasurership 
of the Volunteer Committee for the 
Fatherless Children of France, be- 
fore I consider my duties as Vice- 
President of the Flushing Savings 
and Loan and as Vice-President, 
Director and Member of the Dis- 
count Committee of the Flushing 
National Bank. As a Councillor and 
Member of the Executive Commit- 

page 8 



Goat^Yeathers 

tee of the Authors' League, and one 
of the Membership Committee of 
the City Club, Governor of the Tus- 
caroraClub and Pubhcity Manager 
for the Flushing Red Cross, Flush- 
ing Red Cross Drive and Queens- 
boro Red Cross Drive I can put in 
a few hours of goat- feather gather- 
ing. Night may come without my 
having to do any real work, but if 
not I can avoid it and accumulate a 
few more goat-feathers as Member 
of the Book Committee and Execu- 
tive Committee of the Queensboro 
Public Library, Member of the 
Queensboro Committee on Train- 
ing Camp Activities, Executive 
Committeeman of the Vigilantes, 
Authors' Committeeman of the 
American Defense Society, and so 

page 9 



Goat -leathers 

on for hours and hours and hours. 
I am a member of everything but 
the Mothers' Club of Pubhc School 
20, and everything takes time from 
my legitimate work. I estimate that 
in the last twenty years I have gath- 
ered twenty thousand pounds of 
goat-feathers at a cost of about five 
dollars a pound, and the whole lot 
is worth about twenty cents. 

What I marvel at is that I make 
a living at all. My telephone rings 
seven thousand eight hundred and 
six times a day, and only once in 
the last eight years has it been rung 
by any one who wanted to buy a 
story from me. The other eighty- 
two million times it was rung by 
people who wanted me to gather a 
new crop of goat- feathers. 

page 10 



Goat -Y eathers 

At one time I moved out to the 
barn to get away from the tele- 
phone. The result was that I had to 
come down out of the second story 
of the barn, walk across my prop- 
erty, enter the house, and go up- 
stairs every time the telephone rang. 
I did this eighty-two times a day, 
and then moved back to the house 
and had an extension telephone put 
in my workroom so close to my desk 
that every time I flexed a muscle I 
knocked the 'phone off its table. 
This made it much handier for the 
goat-feather distributers, so they 
called me up oftener. They call me 
before I am out of bed, when I am 
in the bathtub, and after I go to bed. 
Usually they call me to the 'phone 
and then tell me to wait a minute 

page II 



Qoat -Y eathers 

until Mr. Jonesky comes. The fav- 
orite times for calling me are when 
I am in the bathtub, when I am at 
meals, and when I am trying to con- 
centrate on my writing. 

I am not blaming any one for this. 
I did not have to rent a telephone. 
I could have let people come to the 
house. A great many do come to the 
house. On the average, it takes the 
person who comes to the house just . 
one hour to state a proposition that 
could be put in a six- word telegram 
or 'phoned in one minute. The visi- 
tor always begins with a few neat 
remarks about "Pigs and Pigs," 
which is not the name of the story, 
tells how his grandmother laughed 
over it until she sw^allowed her 
false teeth, explains that his grand- 

page 12 



Goat "¥ eathers 

mother was one of the Tootlecoms 
of Worcester, but married into the 
Blahblah family. About half an hour 
later the visitor remarks, " I know 
you are very busy and I hate to ask 
you, but — " Then he asks me to do 
some little trifle hke raising $80,- 
000,000 in Flushing for the War 
Fund of the One-Legged Garden- 
ers' League, which has a plan for 
planting sweet peas in the trenches 
in Mesopotamia. " We know you 
can do it,'' he says pleasantly. I 
know I can do it, too. I feel the great 
urge of ability rise within me. I 
don't care a hang for Mesopotamia, 
or for sweet peas in the trenches 
there ; but it is something I can do, 
and I go ahead and do it. I gather 
two quarts of red, white, and blue 

page 13 



Goat "leathers 

goat-feathers, give eighteen maga- 
zine editors a chance to forget I am 
alive, and find at the end of the 
month that I am three hundred and 
forty dollars deeper in debt than I 
vv^as before. 

It has come about that people are 
actually offended if I don't jump into 
every mad goat- feather quest that 
is proposed. I am firmly convinced 
that there is now extant an Associa- 
tion to Prevent Butler Doing a Full 
Day's Work. I don't v^ant to seem 
egotistical, but I am nov^ of the 
opinion that the Kaiser started the 
war in order to make it seem neces- 
sary for me to make Four-Minute 
speeches on Food Conservation, 
Give Your Binoculars, and Buy a 
Thrift Stamp. 

page 14 



Goat ^Feathers 

Of course, all our patriotic, Lib- 
erty Loan, Red Cross, Thrift Stamp 
side-lining is n't goat-feathering. 
The genuine variety is eagle-feather 
gathering, and I am as proud of 
my eagle-feathers as I am sour on 
my goat-feathers. 

Now it is a fine thing to be treas- 
urer of the Flushing Hospital, and 
it is a fine thing to be president of 
the Flushing Country Club, but the 
goat- feathers pall when you know 
that the reason you were given 
those glories was because nobody 
else would take them. It 's a " grand 
and glorious feelin' '' to know you 
can take some affair and make it a 
success, or a near-success ; but it is 
not business. A man may make a 
success of a Flushing Public Play- 

page 15 



Goat'Yeathers 

ground and not be making a suc- 
cess of himself. He may be making 
a goat of himself. The chances are 
ten to one that he is making a goat 
of himself. 

I '11 never get the Pulitzer prize 
for the best novel or for the best 
play, but if there was a Pulitzer 
prize for the greatest human goat 
nobody else w^ould be in the run- 
ning. I have not got goat-feathers 
by the dozen or by the pound — I 
have them by the bale. I estimate 
that if all my goat-feathers were 
placed end to end they would reach 
from the bread line to the poor- 
house. 

It is just possible that by this time 
you may gather that I have a grouch 
on myself. If so, you are right. To- 

page 1 6 



Goat-Yeathers 

day I am forty-nine years and six 
months old, and as a bright and 
shining hterary Hght I am exactly 
where I was twelve years ago. I 
am twelve years older and have 
that much less time in which to 
complete the joy of making good 
as one of the great American au- 
thors. Presently the infirmities of 
age will begin to gnaw at me, the 
moths will ruin my flossy collec- 
tion of goat- feathers, all those who 
now pat me on the back because 
they can make use of me free of 
charge will forget that I am alive, 
and my executors will shake their 
heads and say, "Ain't it too bad he 
left so little!" 

Distraction is n't really good for 
a man if he wants to reach a goal. 

page 17 



Goat 'Y eathers 

No salesman ever got very far by 
carrying too many side lines. The 
poorest sort of monopoly for any 
man to undertake is a monopoly of 
goat- feathers. 

No man in the world had a bet- 
ter chance to make himself the 
Great American Humorist than I 
had when I v^ote " Pigs is Pigs.'' 
I had a good, solid foundation of 
fairly good humorous work under 
it and the little story had a wonder- 
ful success. The thing for me to 
have done then was to stick to hu- 
mor, regardless of anything. I have 
written dainty stories, sympathetic 
stories, serious stories, all kinds of 
stories, but not many humorous 
stories. It is surprising how often 
editors have had to announce " A 

page 1 8 



Goat-Yeathers 

story that shows this famous hu- 
morist in an entirely new vein.'' 

Taking literature as a business, 
I can say that a humorist should 
have no " new vein." Neither does 
a plumber succeed as a plumber by 
spending a large share of his work- 
ing hours making violins. No one 
ever succeeds by allowing himself 
to be deflected from the most im- 
portant business of life, which is 
making the most of the best that is 
in him. Even a cow does better if 
she sticks close to the business of 
eating grass and chewing the cud. 
When she starts in to learn to whis- 
tle like a catbird and to flit from 
field to field like a butterfly it is safe 
to say she is no longer a success in 
life. When a cow strays from plain 

page 19 



Goat 'Y eathers 

milk-producing methods and be- 
gins climbing trees and turning 
somersaults, she may be more pic- 
turesque, but she is gathering noth- 
ing but goat- feathers. Seven farm- 
ers, a school-teacher and a tin 
peddler may line up along the fence 
and applaud her all afternoon until 
she is swelled with pride, but when 
she gets back to the barn at sun- 
down she will not give much milk. 
She will not be known as a milch 
cow long ; she will be a low grade 
of corned beef, a couple of flank 
steaks and a few pairs of three-dol- 
lar shoes. 

I can sit down to write a story 
about a man who fell off a bridge 
and landed in a kettle of tar on a 
canal boat and, before I have com- 

page 20 



Goat -Y eathers 

pleted a full paragraph, I can have 
stopped to clean the small o, small 
e, and small a of my typewriter 
with a toothpick, stopped to think 
about the pearl buttons on a vest I 
owned in 1 894, the Spanish- Amer- 
ican War, what the French word 
for "illumination" is, and whether 
I paid my last Liberty Loan install- 
ment. Before I have finished that 
first paragraph I may have stopped 
to fill my fountain pen, gone down- 
town to attend a meeting of the Red 
Cross Committee, started to recat- 
alogue my published stories, and 
taken a trip to Chicago. Before I 
have got to the first period in the 
first sentence I may have decided 
that I would not have a man fall off 
the bridge but have a woman fall 

page 21 



Goat^Yeathers 

off it, that I would not have her fall 
off a bridge but off the Wool worth 
Building, that I would not have her 
fall into a kettle of tar but into a 
wagonload of feather beds, that I 
would not have her fall at all, that 
I would not write a humorous story 
at all, that I would not write at all, 
and that I would, instead, get an 
empty cigar box and make a toy 
circus wagon for my young son. 

I once made an entire doll' s house, 
two stories, four rooms, kitchen and 
bath, with hand-carved stairways 
and electric lighting throughout, 
the walls entirely weatherboarded, 
putinthecarpets, papered the walls, 
hung lace curtains at the windows 
and painted the exterior, and all be- 
tween two paragraphs of a story. I 

page 22 



Goat "¥ eathers 

spent three months on that little 
trip after goat-feathers, and in the 
meantime Arnold Bennett prob- 
ably wrote three novels of several 
hundred thousand words each, 
gained an international reputation, 
and passed me on the road to fame 
like an airplane passing a snail. 
George Ade kept pegging away at 
his «« Fables" with the regularity 
of a day laborer, and Peter Finley 
Dunne ground out his "Mister 
Dooley" like an unwearied sau- 
sage-grinder. 

On my wall, alongside my desk, 
I have a calendar, and the sheet that 
faces me is that for the first week in 
March, 1916. It says "Concentra- 
tion. Concentrate all your thoughts 
upon the work in hand. The sun's 

page 23 



Goat-Yeathers 

rays do not burn until brought to a 
focus. Alexander G. Bell." That is 
the whole matter in a nutshell, but 
the only use the motto has been to 
me has been to permit me to look 
at it and think about it when I ought 
to be thinking of the story I was try- 
ing to write. 

So far as I am concerned, the 
most important person in the world 
is myself. The most important suc- 
cess in the world is my success. The 
most important money in the world 
is my money. A whole lot of the 
most important debts in the world 
are my debts. The same is true of 
you and your success and your 
money and your debts. 

I hope you are not near-fifty 
years old. I hope you are nearer 

page 24 



Goat-Yeathers 

twenty, but whatever your age I 
can tell you that chasing after goat- 
feathers is mighty poor business. 
The time to investigate interesting 
by-paths is when you are on a va- 
cation, but the New York-Chicago 
Express gets there by staying on 
the track. The minute it starts 
climbing some interesting country 
lane after daisies and buttercups the 
coroners begin to gather and the 
claim agents flock together, and 
some slow but sure old freight train, 
plugging along on the next track 
but sticking to it, toots a couple of 
times and passes by. 

If I am ever the boss of a school 
board I shall insist that no child 
graduate until he can foot correctly 
a pile of numbers four deep and 

page 25 



Goat -Y eathers 

forty high, and do it the first time. 
I have been a bookkeeper in my 
day, and I have footed a column of 
figures twenty times and got ten 
different results. L can go up a col- 
umn of figures, starting like a race 
horse — "Seven and six are thir- 
teen, and five are eighteen, and two 
are twenty, and — and I wonder if 
I put a stamp on the letter I mailed 
this morning — I wonder if Bacon 
wrote Shakespeare's plays — I won- 
der if a bomb from an airplane 
would go through from the roof of 
my house to the cellar — cellar — 
cellar — well, I'm glad I've got 
eight tons of coal in, but I '11 have 
to get more in as soon as I can — 
and six — " Then I have to begin 
at the beginning again with " Seven 

page 26 



Goat "leathers 

and six are thirteen, and five are 
eighteen — " 

The reason children don't get 
their examples right in school is 
because they don't concentrate on 
the matter in hand, and the reason 
men don't get their lives right is be- 
cause they don't concentrate on 
the matter of making good at what 
they know is the business of their 
lives — success. If you stop a mo- 
ment and think of the men you 
know who are not successes, but 
who might be successes, you will 
find they are goat-feather gather- 
ers. Anything that leads a man 
aside from the straight path to his 
goal is a goat-feather. Every use- 
less side line is a goat- feather. Ev- 
ery unnecessary distraction is a 

page 27 



Goat "Y eathers 

goat-feather. Nine tenths of the 
things I do are goat-feathers. 

I don't mind telling you that I 
consider myself a very, very v^on- 
derfulman. Nobody but a most re- 
markable man could spend so much 
time in the goat-feather groves 
gathering goat-feathers and still 
keep his family from starvation. I 
actually gasp when I think what a 
great man I should have been if I 
had stuck to business instead of be- 
ing drawn aside by every sweet 
odor and pleasant sound. Then I 
actually swear when I think how 
many hours and days and weeks I 
have given to making myself look 
like a cross between a llama and a 
stuffed owl, when I might have 
been writing things the editors 

page 28 



Goat-Yeathers 

never have enough of, and buy as 
soon as they read the first para- 
graph. 

It is all right! I 'm not jealous ! 
I '11 sit in the front rov^ every time 
Ade or Tarkington or Chambers 
pulls a success, and 1 11 applaud as 
w^hole-heartedly as any one, but I 
reserve the right to kick myself 
v^hen I get outside. This article is 
one of the kicks, and I hope it will 
have a good effect on me. I hope 
it will teach me a lesson. I doubt 
it; I'm too old; I'm too accus- 
tomed to chasing goat-feathers to 
give it up now. 

So there you have the story of 
what is the matter with me. You 
know now why, when you think of 
me, you think of a story I wrote 

page 29 



Goat-Yeathers 

twelve years ago. I had a main goal, 
but I liked too well to investigate 
all the cross-roads instead of keep- 
ing straight on. That's bad; that's 
gathering goat- feathers. It has been 
bad for me, and bad for my success 
as an author, and bad for my suc- 
cess in the only life I have to live, 
but it is apt to be much worse for 
you to gather goat-feathers than for 
me to gather them, because I can, 
occasionally, weave some of them 
into a stor}^', while you can't do any- 
thing at all with those you acquire. 
The time we waste in excursions 
off the main line of our road to our 
goal is the difference between suc- 
cess and half-success; often it is 
the difference between success and 
failure. 

page 30 



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